Have you seen BetaBlue? It’s an in operational aircraft (an Airbus 320-200) from JetBlue Airways where various wi-fi services are being tested. The aircraft has marking for the airline, Yahoo, and Blackberry (Research in Motion). Look for on board wi-fi access to continue to rapidly increase from various carriers in the next year. For example, Virgin America wi-fi service should be ready to go very soon.

Here’s an image of BetaBlue taken in Cancun. Note the Yahoo and BlackBerry logos on the aircraft.

Travelers in the Middle East Archive at Rice University

Rice University just released the Travelers in the Middle East Archive. TIMEA is a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TIMEA offers electronic texts such as travel guides, museum catalogs, and travel narratives, photographic and hand-drawn images of Egypt, historical maps, and interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps of Egypt and Cyprus. Read more.

Learn More

Source: Rice University (via DSpace)

Jonathan, Siddharth; Paepcke, Andreas. SpotSigs: Near Duplicate Detection in Web Page Collections,

Motivated by our work with political scientists we present an algorithm that detects near-duplicate Web pages. These scientists analyze Web archives of news sites. The archives were collected with crawlers and contain a large number of pages that look very different because the frame around their core content differs. However, the news stories in the pages are nearly identical. The close proximity of unrelated items on the pages makes the detection of content overlap difficult. Our SpotSigs algorithm generates signatures that are spread across each document. Places for these signatures are determined by the placement of common words, like ‘is’ and ‘the’ in the documents. We can vary our method of computing the signatures. Using hash collisions the algorithm detects overlap among the signatures of matching contents. We study how the different SpotSigs parameters impact precision and recall performance. We propose and evaluate variants of SpotSigs on a test bed of 2168 Web Pages and study the tradeoffs involved. One of our motivations was also to keep pre-processing requirements low for the detection of near duplicates and to this end we do not remove ads, client side scripts and other HTML formatting elements from the documents. On this data set SpotSigs obtains a precision of over 93% and a recall of over 85% for near duplicate detection.

Source: Stanford Info Lab

Dr. J. reviews what Amazon.com is up to in terms of music downloads (cost, DRM, etc.) and compares it to what’s available from iTunes, emusic, Napster, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Rhapsody and others. He also notes in the opening paragraph that their are probably, “ten times as many —arguably— illegal sites.” He summarizes his review with the following:

Amazon MP3 download store offers 3 million legal, unprotected, high-quality tracks for 89¢-99¢ a piece, and albums from $6 to $11, directly in MP3 format. All these are yours to play and burn without the usual limitations imposed by Digital Rights Management software, and without any membership fees. However, the search module needs to be improved.

Source: Gale.com

Report on Librarians’ Feelings About Automation Is More ‘Validating’ Than ‘Surprising’
From the Info Today NewsBreak by Kathy Dempsey:

Keeping tabs on the world of library automation technology can be a difficult and confusing task, so it helps to have someone like Marshall Breeding to do it for us. For nearly 2 decades he has been methodically tracking both integrated library system (ILS) companies and individual ILS products. This month he published the results of a new survey, the first where he asked librarians how satisfied they are with their current ILS products, vendors, and support services and how likely they are to explore open source products. The data he culled from nearly 1,800 respondents in 47 countries paints an interesting picture.

The full report, “Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation,” published only on Breeding’s Library Technology Guides site (www.librarytechnology.org/perceptions2007.pl), does clearly rank some products above others. But, as Breeding points out, readers need to evaluate the results “with the proverbial grain of salt. … I worry that surveys like this one draw out the negative more than the positive. A survey provides an opportunity to vent against a vendor during a problematic episode, even when the relations with that vendor have been positive over the longer term.” But he calls the survey “an important exercise” to gauge opinions on the current state of automation.

Source: Information Today

Lifelong Literacy: Explore New Worlds Booklist

Books can open windows to new worlds and doors to adventure. As part of its Lifelong Literacy Campaign, which encourages children and young adults to become engaged in reading, the Library of Congress presents a sampling of suggested books that will spark imagination and transport readers to new and exciting places. Look for them at your public library or in your local bookstore.

Source: The Library of Congress

In recent months we’ve posted about a number of sites that allow users to dial a telephone number and then listen to content over the phone.

From National Public Radio to The Lincoln Memorial to just about any podcast (using Podlinez).

Today, a variation on that theme from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Here you can listen to audio tours (just like you would if you were touring the museum) on your iPod or any other MP3 device. Using Podlinez or Phonecasting.com you can set up with a dial-in number and listen to these tours (in podcast format) over the telephone (just by making a simple telephone call). It couldn’t be easier. In most cases, the service is free, all you pay for is the call.

This page lists all of the podcasts/programs/tours from the Museum of Modern Art that can be downloaded/streamed and in some cases heard over the telephone.

It’s simple! Take the RSS url for MOMA’s podcast(s) and enter it into Podlinez. You can listen to the latest podcast or any podcast that has an RSS url (often ending in XML). Once you have the url, head to Podlinez, enter the url and you’re ready to listen. Remember, this should work with just about any podcast not only those from MOMA. That’s right, listen to any podcast over the phone. Talk about a tool that helps flatten the learning curve for all users and podcasters.

In a matter of seconds you’re provided with a phone number and a few minutes later, you’re able to listen on your phone like you would any other call.

With headphones, they sound great! For example, dial and listen to +1 (801) 349-3832 to test out what we’ve been talking about from MOMA. Have fun!

Want more?

Here you’ll find other examples and more about the growing world of phonecasting.

+ National Public Radio Phonecasts

+ The Lincoln Memorial Phonecasts

+ National Gallery of Art Phonecasts

+ ESPN Phonecasts

+ Making Podcasting Easier for the Listener to Access, Enjoy, and Utilize

EU Court ruling brings free legal downloading one step closer

Free downloading of music or films from the Internet, though still illegal, has received significant support from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which ruled yesterday that Internet providers cannot be obliged to release customers’ personal data during civil legal claims raised by copyright owners.

See Also: LinksDossier: Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights

Source: Euroactiv

A full review will be coming soon on ResourceShelf.

What is it?

1) Available for IE only!

2)

The gClick™ button allows readers to dynamically extract real-time comprehensive intelligence — on companies, executives, and events — from any Web page with the click of button. Within seconds, you can go from scanning an article, anywhere on the web, to viewing in-depth information about the companies and executives referenced in the article.

3) gClick gathers real-time, contextual business intelligence from any story or HTML page by clicking on the button or using imbedded links.

More here. The technology comes from a company named Generate Inc. American City Business Journals became a “Strategic Investor” in Generate Inc. in 2005.

Here are two screen caps of gClick in action using a WSJ story. It works with all content, not only American City Biz Journals material.

1 (the story itself) ||| 2 (clicking on a company mentioned in the story)

Worth a look and more coming from RS in the future about gClick. It’s a free app, btw. We also hope a Firefox version is also in the works.

+ Add Footnotes & Endnotes to your Zoho Writer Documents
Hooray! Hooray!! Hooray!!!

+ Google Universal Search: 2008 Edition (via SEL)

+ Hackers Rig Google to Deliver Malware (via PC World)

+ It’s Hard to Hide From Your ‘Friends’ (via WSJ)
Note: No mention of the Ask.com Eraser feature that might also be of interest. You can read about it here. Gary is Director of Online Info Resources at Ask.com.

+ Oklahoma Governor Pushes Bill To Create Rx Drug Web Site

+ Middle East and Asia lose internet access after cable fails (via The Guardian, Hat Tip, Barry)

Updated: Web Guides produced by the Digital Reference Team of the Library of Congress

A more complete listing of online guides covering other Library of Congress collections is available at the Library of Congress Bibliographies, Research Guides and Finding Aids web page.

Source: LOC

If you’re interested in tracking legal cases involving some of the most well-known it companies, a section on Justia titled, “Cases in the News - Documents,” is a must bookmark. Each section and case has its own RSS feed and news/new court documents are updated as they become available.

Here’s are some of the companies being featured:
+ Google
+ Amazon.com
+ Facebook
+ Yahoo
+ Apple
+ eBay
+ Microsoft

Documents can also be accessed by type of case. Including:
++ Copyright
++ Trademark
++ Filing Data
++ Updated Filings

Each entry has the court docket and links to the primary documents. Another useful feature is that with a click you can quickly see when the last documented was filed. Of course, using an RSS feed will also take care of this.

In addition to these featured cases, other important cases are listed by type. For example:
+ ADA
+ Civil Rights
+ Voting
+ Trademark
+ Antitrust
+ Freedom of Information Act

Source: Justia

Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry

Most industries do not begin on a single day, but it’s easy to see Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation on May 24, 2007, as the starting gun in an entrepreneurial race that some have dubbed “the Facebook Economy.”

On that day in May, Zuckerberg announced that the privately held social networking site he founded in 2004 would open to third-party developers, transforming itself from a popular website to a platform on which other businesses can operate. Eight months later, more than 14,000 applications from third-party developers are live on Facebook, allowing users to do everything from flirt to browse for books. The most successful are raking in profits from ad revenues.

Is Facebook becoming the social operating system of the Internet, poised to support a whole new generation of businesses? Or is this new industry of applications leaning too heavily on the quixotic popularity of a single website? Industry leaders and Wharton experts see major opportunities ahead for those who can manage the risks.

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

See Also: Facebook asked by Mattel to remove ‘Scrabulous’

The February/March 2008 Issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is Now Online
50 pages; PDF.
Articles include:
+ Information Professionals in the South Asian Region: The Challenges Ahead

+ Digital Inclusion Initiatives in Brazil

+ Annual Meeting Coverage

+ Kosova Libraries: Where Practical Steps Are Most Needed

+ Distance Learning/E-Learning for Iraq: Concept and Road Map

Source: ASIS&T

UK: Copyright, IPR and the Institutional Repository
The Repository Support Project recently ran a one-day Professional Briefing at Queen’s University Belfast in which Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN gave a presentation entitled “Copyright, IPR and the Institutional Repository”. Slides from this presentation are now available.

Source: UKOLN